Allies of Donald Trump are annoyed that “First Buddy” Elon Musk continues to assert his dominance over the president. In fact, one White House official told Politico that the unelected co-president “very much” overstepped when he trashed a recent artificial intelligence project that the president had announced.
Earlier this week, Trump publicized a new Stargate venture to help grow AI infrastructure in the United States. The new entity will also start building out a data center and the electricity generation needed for the rapidly growing AI in Abilene, Texas, according to the White House. With an initial investment of $100 billion, there are plans to pour up to $500 billion into Stargate in the coming years.
“This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “We’re going to make it as easy as it can be.”
Hours after the announcement, in a rather unprecedented move, Musk took to his social media platform, X, to dunk on the deal. He claimed that OpenAI, whose leaders, along with those from Oracle and SoftBank, had stood alongside Trump during the announcement, is too poor to fulfill its high-dollar pledge. In a sense, the Tesla CEO divulged the rocky ground beneath Trump’s deal while elevating his own knowledge of AI and tech. This is sure to further inflame the already shaky relationship between the two self-imagined strongmen.
“They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote on X in response to a post from OpenAI announcing the digital infrastructure deal. “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”
Musk also reshared a post from another X user who suggested that Sam Altman, a Trump crony and OpenAI’s CEO, and his team smoked crack to “come up with their $500 billion number for Stargate.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
According to Fortune, OpenAI and SoftBank will lead the project, with SoftBank taking on the venture’s financial responsibility and OpenAI assuming operational duties. Altman called Stargate “the most important project of this era.”
One can imagine, then, that Trump wasn’t too pleased when Musk pooh-poohed it. One Trump ally told Politico that Musk is abusing his relationship with the president; another claimed Trump’s staff was “furious” over Musk’s various X posts.
“It’s clear [Musk] has abused the proximity to the president,” the Trump ally said. “The problem is the president doesn’t have any leverage over him and Elon gives zero fucks.”
It’s possible that Musk’s temper tantrum was a result of the fact that he seemingly wasn’t invited to Tuesday’s White House presser. Notably, Musk owns an AI startup and has long been critical of Altman, his onetime partner in the burgeoning AI world. (Altman and Musk cofounded OpenAI, but Musk later departed and sued Altman and the company, alleging that they betrayed the firm’s founding principles. Musk dropped this lawsuit before filing another. In the second suit, Musk claimed he was “deceived” into cofounding the company.)
At least publicly, Trump attempted to downplay Musk’s actions and blamed his diatribe on X on Musk’s disdain for Altman.
“The government’s not putting up anything. They’re putting up money. They’re very rich people, so I hope they do,” Trump said, according to Politico. “And, I mean, Elon doesn’t like one of those people.”
But it seems obvious that, as some journalists have predicted, the relationship between Musk and Trump is destined to flame out.
Trump’s allies have already expressed concern with the level of access and power Musk has. After all, Musk harbored blame for helping tank a bipartisan budget proposal in December, but was never really punished for doing so.
Since then, arguably, he’s only received more access to the goings-on of the Oval Office. After all, he has a White House email and office space close to the West Wing. It’s just weird that an unelected senior adviser would publicly criticize one of the president’s prized initiatives and expect things between the two to be okay after.
Trump put up with a lot of internal discord in his first term but has shown this time around that he’s fine pushing out those who annoy him.
He’s already joked at least once that Musk “won’t go home” and that he “can’t get rid of him.” At the time, these were just jokes—or so Trump says. But it’d be somewhat ironic if the guy who pushed out his Department of Government Efficiency cochair is next in line to get the pink slip.
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